I am a MA/MBA candidate at the Lauder Institute and the Wharton School of Business. I focus on Russian politics, economics, and demography but also write more generally about Eastern Europe. Please note that all opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone and that I do not speak in an official capacity for Lauder, Wharton, Forbes, or any other organization.
I do my best to inject hard numbers (and flashy Excel charts) into conversations and debates that are too frequently driven by anecdotes. In addition to Forbes I've written for True/Slant, INOSMI, Salon, the National Interest, The Moscow Times, Russia Magazine, the Washington Post, and Quartz.
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All Of Eastern Europe Has A Brain Drain Problem

I’ve written before about Russia’s “brain drain,” and how, in contrast to a lot of what gets said in the media, if you look at actual immigration statistics the flow of people out of Russia appears to have slowed substantially. Nonetheless, you still regularly see articles saying that Russians are leaving their country en masse because of Putin’s autocratic depredations and the general misery of living in such a corrupt and misruled society. The Economist even went so far as to say that “people” were one of Russia’s primary exports.

The general consensus among the people who write such articles is that Russia will continue to lose its best and brightest citizens until it unleashes the press, reforms its courts, cleans up its elections, and generally places a much higher value on public engagement in politics. Basically, Russia has to become a lot more like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and other East European countries that have successfully joined the EU and become “normal.”

There’s only one problem, though: several of the countries in the region that have made a lot of progress in political, economic, and legal reform are themselves suffering from “brain drains.” A recent article in The Economist observed that the flow of people out of Poland has actually been increasing over the past few years despite the fact that Poland’s economy has weathered the financial crisis exceedingly well and despite the fact that most of Western Europe remains mired in a crushing recession. That’s right, folks, the country that, more than any other in the region, is used as a stand in for bold political and economic reform is also suffering from an increasingly severe brain drain.

But why are people leaving Poland? Well it’s certainly not because the government is corrupt and oppressive. Poland’s government is an open and accountable one and elections there are completely free and fair and have been since the late 1980′s. Yes there is low-level corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency (where isn’t that the case?) but it’s entirely fair to say that, in late 2013, the Polish state is substantially more liberal and democratic than Russia’s. You can look at virtually any index of government efficacy and Poland will outperform Russia, an the same can be said for openness and transparency.

People are leaving Poland because of the simple fact that wages there are a lot lower than they are in Western Europe. That’s it. The people leaving Poland to go work in London, Paris, or, in the case of that Economist article, Brussels, aren’t making any dramatic political gesture, they’re simply trying to earn a more comfortable living. Even after the past 20+ years of catch-up growth, Poland remains very far behind the leading Western countries: in 2012 its PPP adjusted per-capita income was about 54% of Germany’s. This means that even if Poland continues to grow robustly and Western Europe continues to stagnate, it will take decades for a full convergence in Polish living standards. Until then one can expect to see a steady outward flow of people from Poland to the West because Western wages (particularly wages for low-skilled labor) will remain higher.

The point is not to laugh at Poland’s misfortune nor is it to doom-monger. Poland’s economy has performed extremely impressively over the past decade, and if the brain drain is really such an awful phenomenon it has been entirely absent from the relevant statistics. Rather, the point is simply to note that Eastern Europe has always economically lagged behind the West and that communism made things even worse. Western European living standards are so much higher than Eastern ones that, short of re-creating the iron curtain, there’s nothing that the region’s governments can do to staunch the outflow of people. People tend to pursue economic opportunity, and in a contest for workers a country with a per-capita income of $20,000 will inevitably lose to a country with a per-capita income of $40,000.

Russia, in other words, can reform to its hearts content, it can become the most thoroughly democratic and efficient government in human history, and a substantial number of people will still decamp for the West simply because the West is a lot wealthier. This doesn’t mean that Russia shouldn’t reform, it simply means that even if Russia does engage in a top-to-bottom liberalization of its political institutions we will be subject to a never ending series of articles bemoaning the “brain drain.”

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